


The Best Laid Hands

by Mysecretfanmoments



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Getting Together, M/M, Sharing Body Heat, Winter Solstice, kagehina as third years, kageyama's birthday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-24 22:01:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17108897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mysecretfanmoments/pseuds/Mysecretfanmoments
Summary: Hinata takes good care of his favourite setter. Meanwhile, Kageyama has no opinions on romance, and wishes people would stop asking him.





	The Best Laid Hands

**Author's Note:**

> HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE BOY! HAPPY FOURTH SEASON ANNOUNCEMENT TO US!
> 
> Guys?? It's a good time to be alive and loving Haikyuu ;v; I hope you enjoy!

Tobio stares at his hands in surprise, like they've changed into alien objects below the wrist. It has a lot to do with the pair of smaller hands pressing warmth into them, rubbing along the backs and knuckles, oven-hot compared to his frozen digits.

“How could you forget your keys?” Hinata asks him, pulling Tobio’s hands in against his chest. He's looking around the club room like he expects to find a convenient space heater lying around—which would be surprising, since the two of them have been at Karasuno for two and a half years now, and they’ve never encountered a club room heater.

“It's fine,” Tobio says, making a half-hearted attempt to pull his hands back; Hinata's are cooling steadily.

Hinata holds on. “No, you're still frozen.” He notices his own hands losing shareable heat, though, and looks around some more before glancing down at himself: his coat half open, his scarf lopsided and mostly off. He'd been shucking outerwear when he noticed Tobio's shivers. 

Finally he seems to come to a decision, and pulls their tangle of hands up to hold a frozen Tobio hand to either side of his neck, where his skin is scalding hot. Tobio tries again to pull back.

“It's fine—”

“No! What will I do if you catch a cold?”

“Stay away,” Tobio says. Hinata’s skin is so warm, and the column of his neck is so dangerously unprotected...

Hinata glares at him. It’s then that Tobio notices Hinata has hat hair, the normally voluminous mop of orange tamped down in odd directions. Tobio manages to pull one of his hands to freedom, but he uses it only to run through Hinata’s hair at the top, setting it to rights. Hinata jumps at the gesture.

“What was that for?!”

“Your hair was flat.”

“Oh.” That answer seems to satisfy Hinata well enough; he pulls the escaped hand back home to his neck, where hot blood rushes thick and fast under soft skin. Quite separate from the warmth, the sensation of Hinata’s vulnerable neck under Tobio’s loose grip is… a lot. Tobio has grown used to moments like this in the past year, when Hinata helps him through massage or stretching, and he helps back, but they still make him twitchy—and this is worse than all those times.

“You should wear your leggings during practice,” Hinata says. “And a long-sleeved T-Shirt.”

Tobio stops thinking about his hands around Hinata's neck long enough to ask, “What?”

“The leggings with the stirrups, that you use for running. Wear them under your shorts and kneepads. I don't think you should have exposed skin.”

“I'll get too warm—”

“The gym is really cold; I could see your breath yesterday. I think a heater is broken.”

Tobio blinks. He'd thought, yesterday, that they hadn't been playing hard enough. Is a heater really broken?

His hands are only just starting to thaw, courtesy of Hinata’s entire blood supply. The thought of an icy gym causes unusual reluctance. Is he really getting sick, like Hinata fears?

“Okay,” he says.

“You'll bundle up?”

“Yeah. Will you?”

“I'll wear my sweater to start!”

Of course Hinata holds Tobio to one set of rules and follows another. Tobio opens his mouth to accuse Hinata of hypocrisy, but closes it when Hinata moves their hands from his neck—finally beginning to cool, at least on the surface—to his face: warm forehead, flushed cheeks. Tobio sighs with pleasure a moment before he gets his thoughts in order.

His eyes fly open, ready to deny being a weirdo—and that he sighed—but Hinata's eyes are downcast, not accusing, and he moves the cold of Tobio’s skin against the heat of his own face with tenderness. Like he's… nuzzling Tobio. Rubbing his face on him. Tobio forgets to breathe, and the bone-deep chill from earlier splits into a fault line of warmth.

He doesn’t say a thing. He’s afraid to end the moment, no matter how weird it is. Cats move their faces like that, sometimes, against other people’s hands—but animals don’t like Tobio. He’s never had anyone or anything act like this about him before.

He’s beginning to get too warm.

Hinata pulls back, looking at the hands he holds. “You’re warming up,” he says.

“Yeah.” Tobio’s voice is thick. “Thanks.”

“You’ll wear the leggings?”

They’ll be too warm as things stand. Sweat is beginning to break out on Tobio’s skin—but he can’t quite acknowledge that, even to himself. “Yeah.”

 

* * *

 

Practice is warm, but it turns out a heater  _ is _ broken. Takeda tells them practice is cancelled until they can get the heater fixed, apologising a thousand times, but Ukai smiles grimly, and when no one leaves after Takeda’s pronouncement, Tobio begins to smile too. Takeda watches everyone, visibly horrified.

“No, really, you should all go home...”

Takeda says that, but when no one does as he tells them he doesn’t leave, either. He stays until the end of practice, his exhales turning into white puffs of steam before him, shivering under several layers. He gives his scarf to Yachi to wear—Yachi has donated  _ her _ scarf to her manager-in-training—and the three of them shiver in tandem.

Tobio, by contrast, doesn’t feel the cold. He’s wrapped up and moving, and he and Hinata are on a wavelength. Every screwball move they try pays off; every last-ditch effort between the two of them turns into a point. When Tsukishima decrees a practice match where Tobio and Hinata play on opposing teams, Tobio feels like his arm has been cut off—but an awareness sticks around, and he knows where Hinata is on the other side of the net.

It keeps him warm. 

“That’s enough,” Takeda insists, at a reasonable hour. “You can’t win nationals if you’re sick.”

“Keep fighting the good fight,” Ukai tells Takeda, grinning wearily. “I love to watch you trying to talk sense into them.”

“Ukai-san! You should be helping!”

Tobio’s eyes slide to Ukai, who puts his hands on his hips. For a moment he looks tempted to let practice continue—but then he claps his big hands together.

“Okay, team. That’s enough. Your teacher is going to worry himself sick if you keep at it, and then where will we be?”

“Nationals?” an underclassman offers, and people laugh. Tobio worries they’re not respecting their elders; do they not realise Takeda’s contribution? But—

“We’ll stop,” Yamaguchi says, holding up his hands. “Right, Hinata?”

Hinata’s eyes find Tobio’s through the net. There’s a charge, and a familiar thought:  _ one more match, one more point, one more toss _ —but Hinata says none of this. He nods, caught volleyball held steady between his palms.

“We’ll stop for today,” Hinata says.

Tobio wonders if he should feel betrayed. This is Hinata—his Hinata, in a way. The guy who doesn’t know  _ no _ , or  _ stop _ , or moderation as a concept. They’ve made a habit of doing the impossible, and being impossible while they’re at it—but Tobio finds himself nodding. It’s cold in the gym, and not everyone is covered up, and Takeda deserves some peace of mind after all the work he’s done.

Is this what Sawamura used to feel like? Tobio doesn’t like it, but he accepts it as his due. It seems to be the way of things: first years are reckless, second years are caught in the middle, and third years… well. They learn to be responsible.

His eyes catch Hinata’s again.  _ Responsible _ . Is that them, now? Only when other people are around.

The team disbands, changing into warm winter clothes in the club room. They chatter about a million things, and tease their fellow teammates about plans—or lack thereof—for Christmas Eve. One of the first-years asked Yachi on a date and was fumblingly rejected, and he bears the brunt of the teasing—but he bears it well, and insists that Yachi-san’s rejection is better than another girl’s acceptance.

Hinata has something to say about every single thing, which tempts Tobio to chime in—but this is stuff he has zero experience with, and little interest in. He stays quiet, preferring to hear what others think. Then he tunes them out, because the others—including Hinata—just sound idiotic.

“What do you think?” Hinata asks at the end of some discussion, nudging him. Hinata asked his question in an undertone, rendering it private, but Tobio hasn’t been paying attention.

“Hn?”

Hinata sighs. “Uchida’s dilemma! Does he ask Yama-chan out, knowing it might be too late to make reservations anywhere nice, or does he wait till Valentine’s?”

Tobio blinks down at his friend. Does Hinata really expect him to have an opinion on this?

“Do reservations matter?”

“What? Yeah! What if she says no because he can’t take her somewhere good?”

“That’s better than saying yes because he can, isn’t it?”

Hinata begins to reply, then stops. He looks thoughtful. “You mean, her mind is already made up? And it doesn’t matter where he takes her?”

Tobio slings his bag over his shoulder, the weight of it familiar. “I don’t see why it would. Isn’t it about him, and not the place?”

“You don’t think the timing matters? The setting?”

Tobio wishes Ennoshita hadn’t graduated. Ennoshita would have a million things to say on the subject, including what would make the best movie scenario—but Tobio has precisely nothing to contribute. He shrugs. “She likes him or she doesn’t.”

“Maybe she could learn to like him!” Hinata says. “In the right place, with the right conversation…”

It seems flimsy to Tobio. What kind of love is decided by what restaurant a first date happens at?

“Never mind,” Hinata says. “You’re opaque as ever, Kageyama-kun.”

“Opaque?” Tobio asks, holding the door open for Hinata. It’s Tsukishima’s turn to lock up.

“Hard to read,” Hinata says.

Tobio grunts, and lets the door fall shut. Hard to read? Him? He sticks his hands into his pockets before they have a chance to freeze, descending the stairs behind Hinata.  _ Opaque? _

“What do you think, then?” he calls at the bottom of the stairs. His words fog in the air, the yellow cast of the school’s security lights giving the colourless exhale an odd hue in the dark.

“I told Uchida what I thought! Weren’t you listening?”

Tobio wasn’t. He shrugs, and Hinata scoffs as he locates his bike in the bike rack and pulls it out.

“He should wait! The moment needs to be perfect. What kind of girl is going to be impressed by a last minute date? Won’t she just think someone else said no?”

_ Who cares? _ Tobio wants to ask. Either Uchida will be successful or he won’t. Manipulating the situation towards one outcome or the other seems pretty useless; Uchida won’t grow more handsome or charming between now and February, and this Yama-chan—whom Tobio has never laid eyes on, but is oddly annoyed by—might have a boyfriend by the time Uchida gets his act together.

“They should just be honest,” Tobio says. “Both of them.”

Hinata glances at him, eyelashes casting long shadows in the uneven light. “Really?”

“He likes her. She can say yes, or maybe, or no.”

“But that’s—scary! He wants to be given a chance.  _ No  _ is so…”

Tobio waits.

“So final!” Hinata says finally. 

“So?” The conversation is beginning to bore Tobio again, even though it’s just him and Hinata. He’s usually interested to hear Hinata’s opinions on things, but this just feels stupid—and not in the fun way that leads to Hinata bursting out laughing and Tobio feeling quietly pleased. In fact, Hinata is beginning to look concerned.

“Aren’t you ever scared of people saying no to you?” Hinata asks.

Tobio considers the question. “Only when I don’t know the person. Like with Kozume, or Akaashi…”

“Right, okay. Well, the feeling you have about other setters refusing to help you is… similar. To what Uchida’s scared of. And you never talked to Kenma or Akaashi! Not that first year. So get off your high horse.”

“I’m not on a high horse,” Tobio says, but he understands the situation slightly better now, and some of his annoyance at the couple in question fades. It’s scary to want something from someone you barely know, who has no reason to help you. Then again, he’s not sure why Uchida would want things from someone he barely knows, unless Yama-chan is good at some skill he’s trying to improve on.

“Is she on the girls’ volleyball team?” Tobio asks.

“Yes! Weren’t you listening?”

It should be clear that he wasn’t, but Tobio nods in satisfaction. They walk out the school gates, Hinata’s bike rattling along, and Tobio thinks about wanting things from people you  _ do _ know well. That’s less scary, especially for Tobio. Tsukishima usually says no but then does it anyway, and the other three third years tend to say yes unless they’re busy; Tobio knows where he stands.

He thinks of his hands on Hinata’s neck, and Hinata sliding his warm face against his fingers. Latent heat pools inside of him, and his sympathy for Uchida goes from  _ almost none _ to  _ some _ . Sometimes, there are things you want that you don’t know how to ask for. He doesn’t want to be weird about things, but he suspects asking for any of that again would qualify as something way beyond weird.

He lets out a small sigh, and Hinata throws him another glance.

“So just so we’re clear,” Hinata says, “you think the time and place don’t matter.”

“Yeah.” Tobio imagines being asked on a date first thing in the morning, or with lots of people around, and adds: “As long as it’s not a weird time or place, I guess.”

“Shouldn’t he try to make it romantic?”

Tobio groans, his patience ending. “Who  _ cares _ ?”

“Obviously not you,” Hinata mutters, and he finally lets the conversation drop. He talks about some article he read, about especially good volleyball shoes, and this time Tobio listens intently. This is the kind of conversation he likes, the kind that makes sense to him.

Uchida can make up his own damn mind, and leave him and Hinata out of it.

 

* * *

 

Tobio’s eighteenth birthday dawns bright but cold—like most years—and his first thought of the day is to wonder whether the heater in the gym will be fixed. 

His second thought is to wonder whether Hinata got him anything. It wouldn’t surprise him if he didn’t, since this year Tobio had forgotten Hinata’s birthday then pretended he’d planned to treat him to meat buns all along, but he wonders anyway. What does he want from Hinata?

_ Warm skin, cold hands _ . No—not that. Other things. But what is there to need? He already has all the sports equipment he wants. He puts it from his mind, and goes to school like any other day, and in what feels like a treat the heater  _ is _ fixed, so he doesn’t have to cover up in practice, and all the underclassmen are easier to motivate. It’s a good day. The teachers have winter break on the brain, and practice is literally and figuratively heated.

Hinata treats the whole team to meat buns for Tobio’s birthday at the end of their long afternoon practice, the whole bunch of them gathered in the dark outside Ukai's shop, and Tobio realises that’s probably what he wanted most. Hinata even gets him two pork curry buns instead of one, and Tobio is replete after burning his mouth on them. It’s been a good day. A really, really good day—and a good birthday. He’s feeling warm throughout as his teammates start to leave, heading in all directions.

“Stay,” Hinata tells him without looking at him, mouth hardly moving; Hinata is waving amicably at Yachi and the first year manager's departing backs. Tobio tilts his head.

“Huh?”

“Stay here till everyone’s gone,” Hinata says, voice low, and the grease in Tobio’s stomach congeals into tense confusion, which worsens when Hinata tells everyone to head on out without them. They stand below a streetlight alone, and Tobio wipes his fingers to have something to do. Why is Hinata acting weird?

“Can we go now?” Tobio asks.

“No! You have to stay.” Hinata paces, his bike leaning against a wall further along. He puts his gloved fingers together, seeming deep in thought. Eventually he shakes out his hands.

“Okay, never mind,” he says. “We can move.”

Tobio’s motions are robotic as he follows Hinata, and nothing about the atmosphere is comfortable. He’s surprised how  _ uncomfortable _ he can be around Hinata, still; he hasn’t felt like this with Hinata since… well. He’s not sure when.

“Can we turn off here?” Hinata asks.

“No. Why?”

“There’s a park.”

“It’s too cold to practice—”

“Just come along!” Hinata says, and bulldozes around a corner that takes them both out of their usual directions home. Tobio watches in bafflement, but he does as he’s told.

They get to a small children’s playpark, and Hinata sets his bike against another wall. He begins to pace again, then stops. This time he looks up at Tobio, and the look in his eyes is full of challenge.

“What?” Tobio asks defensively.

“I was going to wait,” Hinata says. “For the right time.”

“ _ What? _ ”

“But you said it doesn’t matter.”

Tobio is lost.  _ Incredibly _ lost. “What do you mean? This isn’t even the right neighbourhood.”

Hinata groans. “This is why you’re the one person who doesn’t get to call me stupid!”

Tobio wishes he had a rejoinder, but he’s too confused even for that, and he doesn’t want to make himself look worse than he apparently does. He waits anxiously, glaring down at Hinata. His gratefulness for the meat buns has been wiped away, replaced by worried annoyance.

Finally Hinata takes a breath, and begins to speak: “I like you, Kageyama. A  _ lot _ . I want to date you, and kiss you. And if you hate that, you should say so now and I won’t bring it up again.”

All the breath in Tobio’s body leaves him. He’s choking silently, vision going spotty, but he can’t gasp for air. Eventually he manages: “Kiss?”

“Yeah.”

Heat flares through him.  _ Kiss _ . Not just touch, like they already do, but  _ kiss _ . Hinata’s mouth on his, Hinata’s body close. He starts to sweat.

“Oh,” he says.

Hinata waits, looking grim but determined. The challenge in his eyes is undiminished.

“Yeah,” Tobio says at last. “Yeah, that’s good.”

There’s a gust of wind, then Hinata repeats: “That’s—good?”

“Yeah. Definitely.”

Hinata stares. “That’s  _ all you have to say? _ ”

Slowly, Tobio nods.  _ Happy birthday to me _ , he thinks, wondering if his heart might burst. If it does, he’ll die happy.

“That’s seriously—everything? Yeah, it’s good that I like you? Not, ‘hey, I like you too!’ or ‘that’s a surprise!’ or—”

“I like you too,” Tobio says. 

Hinata throws up his hands. “I thought about it so much! I thought I’d ask you after nationals, in case it made things weird, and also it would be  _ special _ if I asked you then, but then yesterday you didn’t care and today is your birthday so—but—” Hinata begins to pace again, and Tobio snakes out a hand, catching the puffy sleeve of Hinata’s jacket. 

Hinata stops in his tracks, looking up at him. Big brown eyes glow with reflected light, and the cold air Tobio inhales is bathwater warm by the time it reaches his lungs.

“You were planning it?” Tobio asks.

“Yeah! Like a normal human being!”

The facts of the situation are still settling in Tobio’s mind. Hinata likes him, and probably has liked him for a while. Yesterday, when Hinata nuzzled his hands, that was… something. A symptom of the liking, rather than a quirk of hand-warming.

“I like you,” Tobio says. It’s been true for a long time, but it hasn’t needed to be said until now.

“You said that!” Hinata says.

“I really like you.”

Tobio looms—that’s just what happens when he stands close to Hinata, but it feels more loom-ey in the dark—and the annoyed energy in Hinata starts to fade. He goes still, looking up into Tobio’s face. His cheeks above his scarf are flushed from the cold, but they darken further.

“I had a plan,” Hinata says softly.

“Tell me what the plan was,” Tobio says. He has an innate sense of things Hinata won’t ever let go of, and this subject is one of them; better to get it over with now.

“It depended on whether we won or lost,” Hinata says. “If we won, I was going to use the trophy as a prop when I asked you, and ask you in the gym after everyone left. If we lost, I was going to take you to the park we used to practice in during our suspension, and ask you there.”

That doesn’t sound so bad. “Okay.”

“No, but—the speeches! They were really good. The trophy one was… ‘look what we can do together when we try’. And the other one was about how we went to that park back when we didn’t even know if they’d let us back on the team, and how every low point with you is better and I know we’ll get past it, and I never want that to stop. It was  _ sweet _ . Not that I’d expect you to appreciate that.”

Tobio wants to unzip his coat; he feels like his sweat is steaming from his skin, the warmth inside his clothes unbearable. “If you didn’t think I’d appreciate it, why would you do it?” he snipes.

“I was at my aunt’s wedding last summer, and  _ everyone _ asked how her husband asked her out. You have to have a story! And not something stupid like ‘it was his birthday, and we went for meat buns, and then I just got too nervous and blurted something stupid out.’”

They’ve kept painfully intense eye contact up to this point, but now Hinata’s gaze drops. The heat inside of Tobio morphs to pain. He’s feeling too much; he’s not prepared for this kind of emotion. Wins and losses in volleyball are easier to process than what he feels when he looks at Hinata, knowing all this. Knowing Hinata likes him.

His hands come up to cup Hinata’s face above his scarf, not siphoning precious warmth this time. Hinata looks up, and Tobio leans his forehead against his.

“I guess there’s always engagement stories,” Hinata says, killing the words Tobio had been trying to conjure. It’s just like Hinata to go for broke and dangle marriage a moment after broaching the subject of dating; they’ve always escalated too fast. Tobio resolves then and there to be the one to propose—and to do it in a way that’s so good even Hinata feels like he’s been swept off his feet.

He’ll make Hinata feel like he does now: shown up, the loser in a confrontation he didn’t even know was happening.

“Shut up,” Tobio says. “You want to kiss me?”

“Your breath smells like meat buns,” Hinata informs him, then: “Yeah, I told you.”

Tobio leans down, and moves very carefully to kiss Hinata. The gesture is chaste, childish, their mouths closed—but it lights Tobio on fire despite that. The small pressure of Hinata’s brash mouth kissing back makes it hard to keep standing up. When Tobio draws back he can’t help caressing the sides of Hinata’s face, a stray lock of Hinata’s hair, the arch of his brows. Hinata closes his eyes under the attention, and Tobio wants to wrap around him, hold him close, touch his face and his hands and his hair until they stop being so tempting.

Now that the subject has been broached, and he can touch Hinata without being called out as a weirdo, he wants to cling forever—but Hinata would probably call him a weirdo eventually anyway if he did that, and that thought is what allows him to resist rubbing his face all over Hinata’s, and inhaling against his neck. He’ll have to do it sneakily and space the moments out.

“We can tell people whatever you want,” he tells Hinata.

“You’ll lie for me? And say I was cool?”

“Just this time,” Tobio says. He doesn’t mention that it  _ was _ cool, Hinata plucking up his courage and changing things between them, even though it made him nervous. Tobio’s stomach is a useless puddle of liquid warmth. 

“Let’s win nationals,” Hinata says, “and say I asked you out with the trophy.”

“Okay,” Tobio says—even though he likes the thought of that other speech. That one about bad times.

Hinata grins, and leans in. “Are you cold anywhere? I’m really warm…”

Tobio wishes he was cold. If there was snow, he’d put his hands in it and cool them just to touch more—but his hands are lava-hot like the rest of him. 

“I’m warm,” he says regretfully.

“Okay, I’ll take my gloves off.”

“What?”

“So we can hold hands anyway.”

Hinata does as he says he will, taking his gloves off, and grabs Tobio’s hands. Their fingers tangle together between them, and Tobio’s heart seems to lift right out of his chest. They stand in silence for a moment, hearts thumping, and then Hinata begins to talk—about other things. Just the usual stuff, but it’s different when they’re holding hands in the dark, and Tobio senses all the topics are designed to prolong the moment. He goes along with it.

_ I like you _ , he thinks as Hinata mentions a famous volleyball coach’s autobiography coming out.  _ I like you, I like you _ —

The winter wind blows against their huddled bodies as Hinata talks, the low temperature scalding like it always is on Tobio’s birthday—but Tobio doesn’t feel it. This year, on his eighteenth birthday, he’s immune to the cold.


End file.
